Gregory Brush and his team in Montgomery County are recognized nationally for their use of technology in the court.
Greg has been Clerk of Court since 2007. He was elected in 2008, and re-elected in 2012 and 2016. Greg shared his experience in evaluating and implementing redaction software for the Montgomery County, Ohio court system.
When Greg stepped into the office in 2007, Montgomery County had an unmonitored webpage with web portal access to documents within the county. They had documents that hadn’t been defined as far as what needed to or should be blocked. They were blocking the most obvious fields, such as social security numbers, but they had no guidance from the Supreme Court in Ohio and there was no law on what should be blocked. However, Greg knew that the system they were currently working with, needed some major revisions to protect citizens from potential identity theft.
In casual conversation, Greg spoke with someone at Probate Court who informed him they had a similar problem, as well as the recorder of deeds in Montgomery County. They decided to join together, write down the issues they were facing, build an RFP and send it out.
"We had an IT director who was a bright guy. He went through and grabbed the gnarliest, hardest documents that he could find for a company to go through and redact and presented those documents live… and I was very impressed. Extract caught every one of the things that he gave them. We wanted to make sure it could do the hard stuff, the stuff unexplained, the handwritten things. When you're talking about stuff that may leak through, you want to have some good confidence.”
Montgomery County chose Extract System's redaction software, ID Shield, to help them be confident in hosting almost 100% of their documents to the public.
When they first started with Extract, their process entailed manually scanning each page in every document. Sometimes there could be as many as 20,000 pages to go through. They decided to take anything with a slight likelihood of being sensitive and block it out. They are very confident in their results with 98% accuracy or higher. With Extract's solution, they are able to keep their original website while uploading more documents, enlarging their database. Record staff was cut by 80%, ultimately saving Montgomery County time and money. Not only did the number of walk-ins go down, but the number of website visits increased.
The record staff now only deals with documents that come in and have already gone through Extract's redaction solution. In 2009, Ohio came out with rules stating what restricted data elements needed to be redacted, but because of Extract, Montgomery County already had their rules in place. They really didn't need to change much at all.
In the end, Greg wanted to make sure he was doing everything he could to protect the citizens of Montgomery County - and Extract allowed him to do so.
To learn more about Gregory Brush and Montgomery County's redaction solution implementation process and benefits, download Montgomery County's case study here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: KARI SIEGENTHALER
Kari Siegenthaler is a Marketing Specialist for the Marketing Department at Extract. Kari attained her Bachelor of Arts degree in mass communications and convergent media at the University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire. Wearing the “hat of all trades,” she has an unusual, hybrid ability to write narratives, creatively craft meaningful messages, and design graphically compelling images. Kari is passionate about effective communication and developing strategy plans that allow Extract to succeed and excel way beyond their goals.